Jesu - A Pact with the Divine

Justin K. Broadrick is without doubt one of the most eclectic musicians of the last twenty years. The bands and projects he's been part of are too numerous to count, as is the sheer range of genres and musical influences running through his two-decades-plus career.

It's the early Eighties when Justin starts getting into music: despite being active in Birmingham's punk scene, his attention drifts towards more extreme and experimental fringes of music, like industrial and the harshest strains of electronics. In 1985 he joins Napalm Death, a grind-core outfit pivotal to the development of extreme metal; his stint is a very brief one, limited to the English band's debut ("Scum"), on which Broadrick plays guitar and sings. After taking over on drums in Head Of David, a group devoted to industrial experimentation, Justin founds his most famous project: Godflesh. The duo, completed by G. C. Green, stays together from '88 to 2002, releasing fourteen studio albums and numerous EPs.

There's no counting all of Broadrick's parallel projects: God, Ice, Techno Animal and various other incarnations of his fervid, and thoroughly deviant, musical world.

Shortly before setting off on a Godflesh tour in 2002, Broadrick suffers a nervous breakdown that leads to the band's end and a moment of pause for the English musician. His return to the stage, however, doesn't take long: in 2004 the first EP under the monicker Jesu comes out. Rounding out the line-up are Ted Parson on drums and Diarmuid Dalton on bass. The name is taken from the closing track of "Hymns", Godflesh's epitaph album.

Heartache, running little more than half an hour, is built around two long tracks ("Heart Ache", fittingly, and "Ruined"). The title track opens as a crushingly heavy industrial march, with a guitar tread that's terrifying and, in many ways, close to doom metal; after ten minutes of granite-hard hammering, though, what emerges is the very essence of the Jesu project: a disarming melodic opening, epic and solemn, with Broadrick's voice hovering between the transcendental and mystic invocation. The guitars are no longer dark, but instead trace out distorted melodic hues that weave into a sonic fabric not unlike what shoegaze once was. The whole essence of Jesu is contained within the nine minutes of the embryo that opens this EP.

The second track, "Ruined", instead sticks to heavier, more experimental territory, closer to the metal side of Godflesh, although in the finale a half-melodic opening from a submerged guitar cracks small fissures into the isolationist walls of Broadrick's mind. Like a still-uncut diamond, Heartache opens the Jesu chapter superbly, even if it still seems anchored to Broadrick's musical past.

The true expressive power of this project surfaces in 2005, with the release of Jesu.

The nervous breakdown seemed to have led the English artist into a dead end, where, by that point, all that was left was to reckon with himself, devising strategies of self-defence and escape from the psychic quagmire. What strikes most, then, in this latest mutation of his, is the pull towards a sound that, while still caught between light and shadow, comes across as more relaxed and graced with melodic glimmers compared to what came before. The malevolent symphonism of Godflesh, but also the impenetrable doom of the earliest Head Of David, as well as the pitiless noise-making of Final, all find themselves having to flinch before celestial visions, cosmic vertigo, ecstatic raptures. A sonic quest, then, that has managed to chip away at pain and rage while crossing right through some of the most extreme pages of rock music.

Even if still convinced that life is anything but a pleasure cruise, Broadrick, finally showing himself vulnerable, weaves his musical threads with the reassuring gift (though one should establish in what dose...) of hope. This latter is an almost palpable presence, starting with the claustrophobic evolution of drone-music, bordering on space-rock, found in "Your Path To Divinity". A visceral sense of nostalgia, furrowed by astral feedback. Certainly, the hope mentioned above has nothing rhetorical about it. Rather, it's something that seems to go hand in hand with an awareness of life's fragility and tragedy. Ambient-music loaded with meaning and emotions on the verge of emotional collapse. A mammoth pulsing, a possessed lied. Details that shatter the apparent stillness of music that will only repay you at the cost of total devotion.

Reinvigorated with fresh creative and spiritual energy, Broadrick and his two bandmates launch into a massive tour alongside Pelican. Jesu, in fact, despite attempts to come across as an outsider, has become the central name of the new post-metal wave: going beyond the crossover experiments with the post-hardcore of Neurosis, Broadrick becomes the standard-bearer and putative father of a hypothetical hybrid of doom metal, shoegaze and ambient-music.

Proof of this is the 2006 EP, Silver. The record comes out, in fact, under the aegis of Neurot, the above-mentioned Neurosis's own label. The album's four movements meet with mixed fortunes. The title track reflects the changes Broadrick has made to his approach; melodies remain the main coordinates for navigating the sonic chaos, but this time they seem to stand out more comfortably against textures less powerful and incisive than those admired on the debut. Broadrick's indecipherable nostalgic treasure chest loses its cryptic allure, reshaping itself into thoroughly accessible structures.

Where, however, the motifs of Jesu managed to rise like sacred monoliths in the name of a mystic, pantheistic creed, on "Silver" the ex-Napalm Death man weaves melodies that are less original and ethereal, lacking the religious solemnity that had marked the sonic platforms of the previous records. "Silver" reveals an openness to the hope that, in the recent past, had struggled to break through Broadrick's Miltonian abyss.

The tracks that follow ("Star", "Wolves" and "Dead Eyes"), however, fail to match the completeness of the title track. What's missing is that dark, impenetrable matter that shaped the walls of the unintelligible chasms on the debut album. It almost seems that, having overloaded the template with ideas and solutions, Broadrick is now trying to dismantle the mighty structures built up around that archaic whirlpool.

Extreme prolificacy sometimes brings unusual side effects, and Silver, while overall an interesting piece of work, loses out against its illustrious predecessor due to a conceptual shortfall in vision. The result is a scraping-away disproportionate to the prodigious magmatic pantheon Justin had explored with such a ruthlessly agnostic eye. Silver burdens itself with interpolations foreign to the sensitive corpus of the ex-Godflesh man, ultimately delivering little or nothing of the unreachable pain exorcised before. A colourless outing, though one that doesn't dent this artist's stature.

As if in an unstoppable race against himself, Broadrick keeps working in the studio and treading the stages, caught up in a workaholic whirlwind of activity. In 2007 his releases are almost too numerous to count. The most important is certainly the second Jesu full-length: Conqueror, which manages to reach where its predecessor fell short.

Conqueror has been hailed as the most accomplished record in the Jesu discography. Indeed, on this album Broadrick manages to mediate the contrast between the heaviest, most industrial atmospheres (his demons) and the clear, clean, ethereal melodies (his angels). The figure of hope, which on the debut took on ambiguous, deceptive shades, becomes a sharp blade cutting through the imposing layer of obsessions and fears that beset the human soul. Conqueror is an inner struggle rendered in music, a dense, substantial modern work: hope against oppression, man against divinity. All of it translated into sound, where on one side clash the heavy, square-edged guitars, and on the other the ecstatic melodies, forever reaching upward.

What on first listen might seem like noise for its own sake, unbridled confusion, is actually a kind of reasoned chaos. The guitar reverbs, layered little by little, minute after minute into a thick, impenetrable haze, are contained within simple, well-defined, compact rhythms. On another plane sit the melodies: the voice, the occasional synth opening, and even the guitars themselves breaking away from the chorus, always straining upward, in search of something beyond the imaginable.

Broadrick's evocative power reaches its peak on Conqueror, managing to transport the listener to far-off places, thus fulfilling the mission of "transcendentalism" hinted at since the very first EP. "Weightless & Horizontal," a title more fitting than ever, is the non plus ultra of being Jesu: a perfectly realized and unmatched summation.

That same year brought two more EPs, which however fail to match the completeness and solidity of Conqueror, standing instead as two worrying missteps in Broadrick's by now hypertrophic discography.

Sun Down/Sun Rise (released as a 12" vinyl, later reissued on CD as a bonus disc for the Japanese edition of Conqueror) crosses the dilations of Silver with the melodic tension of Conqueror, settling into the usual grey melancholy and drifting toward an ambient-drone not oblivious to Broadrick's heavy past.

The addition of electronic textures lends the operation the value of an experiment, positioning it as an outpost for future (and, we hope, more interesting) shoegaze-metal musings. A continual reshuffling of perspectives, then, that speaks of an untiring musician, perhaps incapable of rationing his energy and holding back his creativity, but always ready to try, even without much conviction and without the proper caution, new paths, new sonic routes.

Lifeline contains four more unreleased tracks for a total of twenty-three minutes of shoegaze-doom, epic and dreamlike depending on the track. It opens with the title track, and from there it's one case of déjà-vu after another: forward-projecting sound, elegiac tone, lyrics softened by melancholy or nostalgia, pseudo-ceremonial ascension. This is an artist who has taken the road of "subtraction," who has chosen to play it safe on familiar ground, repeating himself endlessly, merely tinkering (and not even all that much) with a few variations.

Also from 2007 is Pale Sketches, a collection of b-sides that, according to Broadrick, never found a place on his earlier records. Released in a limited edition on Avalanche Recordings (Broadrick's own label), the collection doesn't seem to want to add anything to what the project had already expressed before, aside from a greater fondness for sounds leaning toward electronics. Perhaps it's precisely this heavier electronic presence that makes the record, if not varied, at least something new and "daring." Unfortunately, though, the overall quality of the tracks leaves something to be desired, despite good intentions. These remain leftovers from earlier works, and should be taken as such.

In 2008 comes the turn of yet another EP. With a total of five tracks (two of which already appeared on a split with Eluvium, one unreleased, and the last two alternate versions of the first two), Why Are We Not Perfect doesn't stray from the core concept of the Jesu project: reverb-soaked guitars swirling in shoegaze turmoil, locked into rigid rhythmic structures, with a mystical, epic voice; the biggest novelty is an extra dash of electronics, which however doesn't change the result all that much.

Broadrick ought to stop for a moment and take up meditation, or some activity quieter than music, in order to recover the inspiration that made works like the debut EP, Jesu and Conqueror so great. This project's discography, in fact, is something anomalous and dangerous, like a tumour to be removed: hypertrophic and insatiable, Jesu keeps spawning small works with no real prospect of lasting life. And yet, under this moniker Broadrick has expressed an important part of his vision, one he managed to render splendidly in the two full-lengths that, to this day, remain high points of music in the new millennium.

Not really a new album as such, Infinity (2009) is a monologue recorded and performed solo by Broadrick. A stream of consciousness that soars back through the roots and developments of that celestial fire which is the Jesu sound, its origins in the black doom pits already explored by Neurosis and the early Swans, the continuation and spiritual sublimation of the inhuman, desperate landscapes of Godflesh filtered through the enchanted ecstasy of shoegaze.

A single 50-minute track; a long journey that offers many pleasant vistas diluted within an overall air of monotony. The first part is rather listless, broken only by a sudden hardening of the voice into a growl not heard since the glory days of Godflesh. An isolated flash of anger, a resentment destined to dissolve into the mists of the second and far more successful half of the work, with that one phrase stretched out into a repeated, infinite fade, a shimmering slow-motion that melts all its weighty burden into an ever warmer, more melodious light.

At the end of 2010, Broadrick celebrates Christmas in his own way, with an EP in which he indulges in a lucid, lavish shoegaze - not far from the distorted gusts of the masters Slowdive, whose spectre also hovers in the echo of his voice; a very brief interlude of pale folk à la Agalloch provides the focal point of the eight mighty minutes of "Christmas." Rounding things out are two remixes credited to Pale Sketcher and FINAL, monikers of other Broadrick projects, who reinvents himself first as dense trip-hop full of reverb-soaked bass, then as a long, intangible ascending drone, emptying the mind entirely of the fervour of Christmas preparations.

The following year brings a new full-length, Ascension, which returns to sonic solutions that suddenly feel outdated, run-of-the-mill. A fine album in itself, but set against a world scene that in recent years has churned out shoegazers by the dozen, large-scale post-rock revivalism, and one where even young black metal bands find room for instrumental musings, it instantly loses its appeal and becomes yet another weary copy of something that has existed and persisted for over a decade now.

The band's undeniable talent makes up for the lack of novelty through inventiveness, through details that heighten the emotional pull, through the commitment that undeniably links this record to the previous albums and EPs, in which a skilled hand plays with layers of harmony, with dynamics, and even with volume levels. The key to reading a work like this can only lie in the details, in the particulars, in contrasts so carefully assembled that they can - and must - only be discovered after more than one listen.

The path toward the divine thus continues exactly as always, as ever with an open heart, weary but unshaken, and there's perhaps little more one could ask of Jesu/Justin. Then again, as we know, it's always a pleasure to be proven wrong by artists of genius...

In Latin, the word terminus expressed the concept of limit, boundary, conclusion. A meaning preserved in the English use of the term, which indeed means "terminus," as fans of "The Walking Dead" know well. Between which of these two meanings does the return of Justin Broadrick move? It had been since 2013 – the release date of Everyday I Get Closer To The Light From Which I Came – that the former Napalm Death member, later founder of Godflesh and the techno project JK Flesh, had put out an album under the moniker Jesu, not to mention the recent collaborative releases with Sun Kil Moon, including 30 Seconds To The Decline Of Planet Earth. Something had already stirred this summer with the Never Ep, which featured the gorgeous "Suffocator": a delicate synth line interwoven with the weight of the guitar, amid drum hits and vocal echoes. A fine preview of the eight tracks on Terminus (2020), released on his own label, Avalanche Recordings.

An album that is dark and grey from the very first glance at its autumnal, melancholy cover, perfectly in keeping with the rest of the gallery of covers the man has chosen over the years. If the landscape looks leaden to us, we need to understand through whose eyes Broadrick is actually looking at it, since the tracks are not lacking in vital inspiration. Fans of Jesu's reverberated, heavy guitar sound will find what they're after right from the opening of "When I Was Small," chosen indeed as the first single. The weighty six-string movement is followed by the gentle melodic freshness of "Alone." While the track seems to want to take flight to escape the clouds of sadness and the sense of failure recounted earlier (“I tried to see both sides/ But I failed/ I failed to be the one/ The one that’s meant to lead/ The one who has no needs”), the swelling ten-minute journey of the title track and "Sleeping In" lead us into the heart of the record.

Having reached the climax with "Terminus," the rest is a gentle but steady descent, marked by the vocoder and drum machine of "Consciousness," by the closing electronic cuts of the mournful "Disintegrating Wings," and by the reflection on one's own identity and the world around us in "Don't Wake Me Up." The instrumental electronic track "Give Up" closes the record, its title – placed at the very end of the album – leaving us to wonder about the fate of the Jesu project itself.

Contributions by Mauro Roma ("Infinity"), Michele Palozzo ("Christmas Ep"), Alex Franquelli ("Ascension") and Alessio Belli ("Terminus")

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